Allow me to let you in on a little suspicion I've had for quite some time now. Given Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah's well-known propensity for macho bombast, I am going to go out on a limb and suggest that he is overcompensating for some deep sense of insecurity. That’s the only plausible explanation as to why he gave the order this week to send another drone toward Israel. The pilotless aircraft was inevitably shot down 8 km (5 miles) before it reached the Israeli coastline.
This wasn’t the first time something like this happened. Half a year ago [Oct. 6, 2012] a Hezbollah drone launched from Lebanon was shot down south of Hebron by an Israeli F-16. Hezbollah nevertheless celebrated this supposed advance in technology and intelligence. So did Iran. They even claimed that the drone managed to take aerial photographs of key strategic sites in Israel, including the Dimona nuclear reactor, before it was shot down.
The “sensitive information” that the drone provided could have been obtained at least as easily by perusing Google Earth. The quality of the photos would have been better, too. But instead, Nasrallah decided to show off his miniature aircraft sans pilot as a counterbalance to Israeli airpower. While Nasrallah may want to prove that he is still a major player in the region, no drone penetrating Israeli airspace can erase the writing on the wall. He and his organization have never faced a bigger crisis.
Yes, I am fully aware that Israel also uses drones, which pay regular visits to Lebanese airspace. But Hezbollah is hardly the Lebanese government, at least not yet. It is a terrorist organization whose armed members are participating in the war crimes being committed in Syria. Nasrallah’s troops are attempting to use their guns to keep Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s bloody regime in power, by force if necessary. That is because Nasrallah knows that the fall of Assad’s regime will mark the end of Hezbollah in Syria. From that day on it won’t be long before Hezbollah is finally spurned by Lebanon and tossed out ignominiously.
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